Methods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby

Too often, healthcare workers are led to believe that medical informatics is a complex field that can only be mastered by teams of professional programmers. This is simply not the case. With just a few dozen simple algorithms, easily implemented with open source programming languages, you can fully utilize the medical information contained in clinical and research datasets. The common computational tasks of medical informatics are accessible to anyone willing to learn the basics.

Methods in Medical Informatics: Fundamentals of Healthcare Programming in Perl, Python, and Ruby demonstrates that biomedical professionals with fundamental programming knowledge can master any kind of data collection. Providing you with access to data, nomenclatures, and programming scripts and languages that are all free and publicly available, this book —

• Describes the structure of data sources used, with instructions for downloading
• Includes a clearly written explanation of each algorithm
• Offers equivalent scripts in Perl, Python, and Ruby, for each algorithm
• Shows how to write short, quickly learned scripts, using a minimal selection of commands
• Teaches basic informatics methods for retrieving, organizing, merging, and analyzing data sources
• Provides case studies that detail the kinds of questions that biomedical scientists can ask and answer with public data and an open source programming language

Requiring no more than a working knowledge of Perl, Python, or Ruby, Methods in Medical Informatics will have you writing powerful programs in just a few minutes. Within its chapters, you will find descriptions of the basic methods and implementations needed to complete many of the projects you will encounter in your biomedical career.

Jules Berman, Ph.D., M.D., received two bachelor of science degrees (mathematics and earth sciences) from MIT, a Ph.D. in pathology from Temple University, and an M.D. from the University of Miami School of Medicine. His postdoctoral research was conducted at the National Cancer Institute. His medical residence in pathology was completed at the George Washington University School of Medicine. He became board certified in anatomic pathology and in cytopathology, and served as the chief of Anatomic Pathology, Surgical Pathology and Cytopathology at the Veterans Administration (VA) Medical Center in Baltimore, Maryland.

While at the Baltimore VA, Dr. Berman held appointments at the University of Maryland Medical Center and at theJohns Hopkins Medical Institutions. In 1998, he became the program director for pathology informatics in the Cancer Diagnosis Program at the U.S. National Cancer Institute. In 2006, he became president of the Association for Pathology Informatics. Over the course of his career, he has written, as first author, more than 100 publications, including five books in the field of medical informatics. Today, Dr. Berman is a full-time freelance writer.